Peter Beinart & David Myers | February 18, 2025

www.writersblocpresents.com

Lumiere Music Hall, Beverly Hills, CA

Video: Karl Sonnenberg

The cataclysmic Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 created a firestorm not only in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, but also in world Jewry. That Israel would respond with massive force was no surprise to anyone. It is the duration, scope, and breadth of Israel’s response that has shaken many in America’s Jewish community.

Peter Beinart, a former (and longtime) editor of The New Republic, and now editor at large for Jewish Currents, is an outspoken critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians who live within its borders and occupied territories.

In his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, Beinart argues that Israel– and Jews around the world– need to think about the rebuilding of the region in not just physical reconstruction terms, but in moral terms as well. Beinart’s book challenges Israel’s war on Gaza, its methodology, and its policies in the West Bank, arguing that creating Palestinian equality, as opposed to its destruction, is the only sensible and moral way forward for Israel.

In conversation with David Myers. David Myers is a Distinguished Professor at UCLA, and holds the Sadie and Ludwig Kahn Chair in History. He is the director of the Luskin Center for History and Policy, and directs the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. He is the author of several books, and is the winner of the National Jewish Book Award, along with his co-author Nomi Stolzenberg, of the great and often jaw-dropping book, American Shetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York.